


afterimage

by MushroomDoggo



Category: 11/22/63 - Stephen King, IT (Movies - Muschietti), KING Stephen - Works
Genre: Action/Adventure, Adventure, Adventure & Romance, Angst with a Happy Ending, Beverly Marsh & Richie Tozier Are Best Friends, Canon Compliant, Dark, Drama, Eddie Kaspbrak Lives, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Gay Eddie Kaspbrak, Gay Stanley Uris, M/M, Post-Canon, Richie Tozier Loves Eddie Kaspbrak, Richie Tozier is a Mess, Stanley Uris Lives, Time Travel, book/movie/miniseries, im a cherrypicker, it varies i'll be honest, what canon exactly?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-29
Updated: 2020-08-25
Packaged: 2020-10-24 23:34:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 19,940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20714393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MushroomDoggo/pseuds/MushroomDoggo
Summary: The Losers could never return to their old lives. To think so was folly, plain and simple. They may try--and try very hard--but the slightest catalyst could very easily send them back into the people they were so very long ago.It starts with the disappearance of Richie Tozier. Having been proclaimed dead after going missing for more than a year, the Losers gather to mourn his death. But nothing is as it seems.Perhaps Richie meant to disappear.--> You really only need to have passing knowledge of the It films to enjoy this fic!! Other stuff will be a bonus, but it's definitely not required <--





	1. Bill Denbrough Watches the News

"Good old friend  
I've come and seen  
Time has passed without me  
Our lives have turned their separate ways  
Yet don't forget the good old days"

-Charlie Allen, _Old Friend_

"I think pain is waiting alone at the corner  
Tryna get myself back home, yeah  
Looking like everybody  
Knowing everybody lost somebody  
I'm standing here in the cold and  
I gotta get myself back home soon  
Looking like everybody  
Knowing everybody lost somebody"

-Bleachers, _Everybody Lost Somebody_

"Nobody reads from the Book of Job  
At the church where me and my grandma go  
Nobody sees the trouble I know  
But I know that trouble's gonna find me"

-Gabriel Kahane, _Empire Liquor Mart (9127 S. Figueroa St.)_

* * *

Bill Denbrough had not acclimated very well.

This shouldn’t be a surprise, of course. After all, who could? Bill had lived these last 27 years in something of a daze, a mere audience member in the show that was his life. Living was easy when you didn’t really have to do it.

Now, though, with the memories of his past finally returned to their rightful place in his mind, Bill had found himself almost completely incapable of living the life he had once lived.

He still wrote, of course. That was inborn.

But it had only taken Bill a few weeks to realize how unhappy he was in his marriage. He and Audra were divorced after about a month.

Bill often found himself sitting alone in his gigantic library, one which held more than a few of his own volumes, and wondering how anyone else could possibly be content with themselves after all that had happened.

Such was his lot today, it seemed. Bill was sat at a long, solid table made of some kind of expensive wood. He had not known what wood when he had bought it, and certainly couldn’t bring that fact to mind now. He had only known that it was expensive, and therefore it must have been good, better than the other types of wood on the market. He found it hard to believe that he had ever thought that way.

Before the aging writer sat a pad of paper and a pen. It was a nice pen. An expensive pen. Just like the table. But, no matter the cost of the pen, it did not make the words flow easier. It didn’t cause Bill to become the detached writing machine he had been before, and it most definitely did not suddenly make it easier to write about horrible things without feeling those dull pangs of painful memories. It had become clear to Bill that those who wrote horror must have never experienced it in the full force that he had, for they would never be able to complete a manuscript otherwise.

But Bill had fans. He had people to impress. He had friends from the time in-between who wanted so badly to read the next Bill Denbrough masterpiece, and it occurred to Bill for what was probably the first time that these people may not be his friends at all. 

Beverly bought every one of his books, she had told him. Couldn’t bring herself to read them, of course, but she loved to have a reminder of her oldest and dearest friend on her shelf. Loved to brag about Bill to those who visited her home. She and Ben, together, could claim to be close childhood friends of the famous author. Could explain how they still spoke with him. Could try to share that love with someone else.

How nice it must be to be with someone who knows, Bill thought. Trauma together brings you together; it must. But trauma apart drives you apart. He wished he had known that before he left for Derry.

"It has been over a year since famed comedian Richard Tozier was declared missing."

Quiet as it was, Bill's ears were trained well, and he heard the gentle murmur of the television through his blizzard of internal dialogue.

"Shit," he swore to himself.

Bill was out of his chair and jogging towards the living room in moments. Not finding the remote in its usual position, Bill began overturning couch cushions with the care of a bull in a china shop. Still empty-handed, he turned to the crocheted throw Ben had gifted him last Christmas, and shook it vigorously. 

At last, the remote tumbled out, hitting the wood floor with a hollow _ thunk _. Bill snatched it off the floor the held his shaking thumb against the volume button.

The newscaster, a woman with a sharp chin and a sharper gaze, continued, her voice growing steadily louder. "Known as 'Trashmouth' by his fans, Tozier’s last public appearance ended abruptly, as the 40-year-old wandered off stage less than 30 seconds into his stand-up routine."

The image of the serious, yet also somehow emotionless, newscaster was replaced by a familiar face. Richie Tozier: the man, the myth, the legend… the vanished.

Bill could have played the clip over in his mind with perfect clarity, and had done so many sleepless nights. The way Richie's face looked pale, even in the warm glow of the stage lights. The way his scruff had far overgrown his usual standard for his shows. The way his voice faltered when he spoke.

All in one breath, he would say "And I stand up at the first meeting and I say--" here, a sip of air, before bellowing "--My name is Richie 'Trashmouth'..."

A pause… Richie’s eyes flickered back and forth, as if reading very quickly, or following some sort of shape as it wove through the audience. 

The camera pans over the crowd. Someone whistles, awaiting a punchline that would never come.

"Trashmouth, uh…" Richie's grip on the microphone would weaken. The look in his eyes, focused on nothing and yet filled with emotions he had not felt in 27 years… and he would say "I forgot the joke." Add a little nervous laugh. That’s it, keep it easy-breezy. Nothing to worry about. Richie Tozier never loses his cool.

The clip would typically end here, as it did today. Richie’s stand-up content wasn’t the most appropriate for daytime television, after all.

The newscaster returned, this time with one of those little boxes hovering over her shoulder. In it, a picture of Richie in a suit, smiling softly. A somber smile. One without true joy behind it, Bill thought. It must have been from the In-Between.

Bill felt a cold hand of fear close over his stomach.

“After nearly two months without any new evidence, investigators have declared Richard Tozier’s case cold,” she said.

Bill fell back onto the couch. Not because he desired comfort, no-- because the news of yet another loser’s death weakened him so that he could no longer stand. Whatever the newscaster said next, it came through in Bill’s mind as a dull humming. 

“A memorial service for the comedian will be held on Thursday, September twenty-second, at the Urban Village Church in Chicago, Illinois.”

The television blinked off. Bill put the remote down on the coffee table.

He had suspected it would happen sooner or later, of course. A public figure like Richie couldn’t just become a question mark, or fade into obscurity. Celebrities didn’t get the luxury of hanging about in limbo for ten or more years before their fate was arbitrarily decided. The people had to know what had happened to Richie Tozier.

It wasn’t that Bill hadn’t considered the possibility. Far from it, in fact. But this was the first time it hit him full-force. 

Richie had never even made it home from Derry, as far as Bill was aware. 

The losers had departed from the Townhouse, all five of them, with bittersweet embraces and promises to keep in touch. 

They did the things people did nowadays, which seem so strange and almost wrong; they friended one another on Facebook, traded phone numbers, created a group chat… with their entire relationship being built in the 1980s, introducing it to new, modern forms of friendship had felt like a collision of worlds that just shouldn’t be possible. Two separate pieces of their lives were being fused into one. As good as it was, it made Bill nervous in a way he couldn’t quite explain.

But they did it. They texted one another, and often. They met up for holidays. They shared their lives in a way that they had never been able to before. 

Everyone but Richie.

Bill pulled himself out of his malaise for a moment, and pulled his phone out of the picket in his sweatpants. No messages of sympathy to be found. Everyone had already assumed Richie to be dead, it seemed, and so the news had no impact.

But Bill felt like he was going to be sick.

First Stan, then Eddie… now Richie. All of his closest friends from childhood wiped from the Earth. The boys he grew up with, the boys he had tried so desperately to remember for 27 years, the boys he had loved more than he could ever love another person. They were a part of him, he thought. Stan’s intellect, Eddie’s caution, Richie’s sense of humor; all physical pieces of himself that he could feel being torn away from him. The iron grip of memories could only do so much to keep them close.

Selfishly, Bill wondered if that meant he was next.

He had his own theories about what Richie had done. Rather than confront them directly, of course, he had cleverly explored them in his latest writings, keeping it a secret even from himself that these wise-cracking and loveable men who died in increasingly mysterious ways were meant to be Richie.

One had run into a burning building to save his first love, and never come out.

One had been captured by a monster that he had thought was most certainly dead.

One had carved his name into a bridge and leapt off.

One had tried to disappear and start a new life, only to be kidnapped by a sadistic murderer.

More and more frightening, on and on went the possibilities, never to be confirmed. The case was cold. The investigators were giving up. No one would ever know what had happened to Richie Tozier.


	2. Mike Hanlon Receives an Alert

Surprisingly enough, the life of Michael Hanlon had changed very little.

That isn't to say it hadn't changed at all. In fact, piecewise, many things were very different than they had once been. But examining things piece by piece had never been one of Mike's strengths. He was a big-picture fellow, if ever there had been one. And, all in all, the big picture hadn't changed.

Life in Derry went on as it had during the entire In-Between. People did the same things, visited the same places, had the same conversations. Sometimes bad things happened, but it wasn't anything beyond the scope of what bad people typically did. There would always be bad people, after all.

Yes, the main thing that had changed for Mike was Mike-- no longer bound by duty to remember what no one else could, no longer spending his years slaving away in library basements reading about unbearably horrible things. No more chest pains, no more heart palpitations. No more always looking over his shoulder. Just living, like normal people did.

He liked it well enough. All those long 27 he just wished for everything to be over, and now it finally was. 

He hoped.

Plans to move to Florida had dissolved. Perhaps it was never meant to be. If Mike was honest with himself--really, truly honest--he could never have lived anywhere else. Had he looked at properties? Sure. Had he visited? Of course. But, as Mike would tell his coworkers at the library, it always felt like vacation down there. He could never be at home someplace that wasn't his home. Perhaps that was all too simple a way of looking at it, but it was the best he could do to explain the way he had felt in Florida. A visitor. A tourist.

When you grow up somewhere, you know it differently than you'd ever know anywhere else. The whole town is your home. Derry would always be his home, and he would be just as comfortable on a park bench as he would be in his own living room.

Take today, for instance. This morning, Mike had gone down to the Barrens. He did this most Saturdays, more often during the summer. Here, he would sit atop the hauntingly familiar drainpipe he and the other losers had once explored, and wait for the children to arrive.

The children always thought--hoped, even--that Mike would forget about them, he supposed. A child's curiosity is too much to tamp down with scolding. Their need to see the inside of this disgusting place was stronger than their fear of Mike's stern voice.

But the joke was on them, because Mike liked it out here. Once one grew accustomed to the smell, it was relaxing to sit back, turn on a small radio, and do a little reading. He always brought two books: a non-fiction (as he had grown to be quite the historian these many years, and was still working his way through Ben's list of recommendations) and something of Bill's. He never got around to reading Bill's, exactly, and he did feel a bit guilty about that. But it was hard, and he supposed that Bill of all people would understand that.

Today, funnily enough, Mike was reading about the history of comedy. Although it wasn’t really all that funny. Mike had guessed that the volume would be light-hearted, which is why he had selected it, but there were far too many chapters about clowns in this particular story. This, combined with the way the sewer pipe creaked and groaned from time to time--even emitting sounds which could almost be human--sent shivers up his spine.

Mike skipped that page, went onto the next. More clowns. Skipped another page.

“Can you really read that fast, Mr. Hanlon?”

Mike startled and slammed the book shut, instinctively drawing his arm back and preparing to throw it.

The five children before him--each one accompanied by a bike, of course--all reacted differently. One shrieked and leapt back, causing the water to soak her tall socks. One held his arms up defensively. One curled his hands into delicate fists. One did nothing at all.

The last, the one who had spoken, snorted in laughter. She wore a beat-up, plain red baseball cap down tight over her head, little curly brown locks poking out from under it. Her shirt was far too big for her. Probably her father’s, Mike thought.

Defeated and somewhat ashamed, Mike lowered the book. “You kids better think twice before sneaking up on someone like that.”

“Right,” said one of the boys, the one who had not reacted. “Or else you’ll really throw the book at us, hm?” He was dressed very modestly, with no bright colors or eye-catching patterns. The tallest of the group, but not their leader.

The girl with the cap looked back over her shoulder. “Not bad, Wes.”

Wes smiled proudly to himself.

“Very funny,” Mike said. He pushed himself up into a sitting position, legs dangling over the entrance to the sewer. “You know what I’m gonna say, right?”

The shrieking girl spoke, brushing frizzy strands of hair from her eyes. “I told you guys. You never listen to me. You always drag me down here where it smells like shit just so Mr. Hanlon can say--”

“Let him talk, Jess,” another boy interrupted. His pronunciation was ever so slightly foreign, for the boy was mostly deaf. Mike knew this because he spent an inordinate amount of time in the library, and because he liked to practice signing in the study room with a little mirror.

Jess, the only one of the group wearing a bike helmet, hung her head.

Mike sighed and looked over the rag-tag group of children. It wasn’t at all lost on him that these children were a reflection of his younger self. A smaller group, yes-- but strong in their own way. Still losers, even in this modern world.

"You know I don't like kids playing down here," Mike said. He always tried to strike a tone of paternal concern-- firm, but warm all the same.

"Yeah but you never exactly have us a reason, did you?"

"Flint!" Jess scolded.

Flint, a gaunt-looking boy with very short and very dark hair, shrugged. "Just sayin'." He talked a big game, Mike supposed, though his fear shown through. His hands had shook ever so slightly when he held them in front of his face.

Mike ran his tongue along the point of a canine. "It's summer. You don't wanna be hearing any dark stories from me."

"Who says we don't like dark stories?" The girl with the cap said. She adjusted her posture ever so slightly, probably in an effort to look tougher. It only served to make her look smaller under the gigantic t-shirt. "We can handle it."

“Rory…” Jess warned.

"Never said you couldn't," Mike said. He placed the book down by his side. "In fact, I'm sure you kids could cope with it better than me."

This sent a small ripple of confidence through the group of kids.

"But just because you can take it doesn't mean I should dish it out." Mike slipped off the end of the drainpipe, landing with only a soft grunt in the ankle-deep water below. "Just trust me when I say there's nothing in there worth the danger you'd be putting yourselves in."

Daniel, their leader, wrung his hands. "It's just--"

Mike held up a hand. "Whatever you're looking for, it's not down there anymore."

Dan looked down at the murky water lapping at his shoes.

"I'm sorry," Mike said. He knew better than to ask more questions.

Dan paused, then nodded in acquiescence. He turned to Wesley and signed a brief message.

Wes signed back in understanding. “Dan says we should listen to Mr. Hanlon.”

“Dan, wait--” Rory put a gentle hand on her friend’s shoulder. “Are you sure?”

Dan’s face melted further. “‘S fine.”

The kids fell silent. Wes looked as if he were about to move in to embrace Dan, but didn’t follow through. There was a tension in the air that Mike could not only sense, but understand with such perfect clarity that he could have sworn he saw his own friends standing before him.

Mike would have been lying had he said it didn’t weigh down his own heart. Especially the girl, Rory. She reminded him so much of Richie…

“Look, I’m not sure what you kids are going through.” Mike tried to make himself seem less intimidating by jamming his hands in his pockets. This was a skill he had mastered with the quieter kids at the library. “But I do know that, whatever it is, it’s not your job to solve it.”

It looked as if Jess wanted to say something, but she bit her lip, quite obviously terrified of saying too much.

Mike took a deep breath, sighed, and said “When I was about your age, my friends and I took on something we shouldn’t have. Made it our responsibility. And it screwed things up, but good. I’m still trying to get through it.” Mike fingers fumbled with one another. “You don’t deserve that. Things are better now.”

None of the kids would meet Mike’s eyes.

“How ‘bout I…” Mike reached a hand up and scratched at the back of his head. One last chance to back out. “How ‘bout I give you kids somewhere else to play?”

A part of Mike thought that, by giving this up, he was only dooming these children to the same life he had lived. But that simply couldn’t be true. Things had ended in Derry, he was certain of it. As wrong and terrifying as it felt, the magic of repetition and cycles had no effect on these kids anymore.

The children looked to Dan.

In Dan’s eyes, Mike saw sacred and lonely little Bill. It was impossible not to. Those boys could have been related, for God’s sake. They had the same taut mouth, the same soft ruddy hair, the same pleading gaze…

“Okay, Mr. Hanlon.”

Mike blinked. “Okay?”

Dan paused, swallowed, and nodded.

Mike took a few steps through the water towards the children. He could tell, just in the way they looked at him, that they felt the same thing he did. The same people from a different generation. A different time. A different cycle. It was entirely possible, he thought, that those children could not identify that feeling, and yet still they trusted it so completely.

“Let’s head into the woods. I think you’ll like this.”

The clearing was suddenly filled with the sounds of feet and bikes being dragged through the water, as the gang of new losers followed Mike towards the woods.

“Say, Mr. Hanlon?”

Mike looked down to his right. Flint was walking his bike right beside the librarian. “Hm?”

“I was just wondering…” Flint looked down at the water. “Well, you said you had friends when you were a kid?”

“Mm-hm.”

“And you did things like this with ‘em?”

“Sure did.”

“Do you s-stil…” Flint looked over his shoulder at the rest of the crew. They appeared to be bickering over something Rory had said. “Do you still… talk?”

The question stopped Mike’s heart for a moment. Such a simple one, no doubt asked by a child who felt that they had found the only place they would ever fit in. A child who just wanted some reassurance that these friends would always be there for him. Who wouldn’t want that, after all?

“Of course. Every day, Flint.”

Flint’s eyes lit up. “Seriously?”

A sad and weary smile spread over Mike’s face. “Dead serious. I’d show you our group chat, but… well, we’re grown-ups now.”

Flint, at last, chuckled a little. “Gotcha, Mr. Hanlon.”

The cold hand of guilt still crushed Mike’s heart, however. He had always feared that, while Derry had been saved from the influence of It, that the people who left may still forget some things. He had no evidence for this, of course. But the fear lingered all the same.

Sometimes, he supposed that was what had happened to Richie. 

It was the easiest way to think about it. If Mike could ignore all the news stories, all the conspiracy theories, all the reasons that such a stupid idea was just dead wrong, plain and simple… well, it was sort of nice to think that Richie had forgotten them and moved on.

He was the one who needed it the most, Mike thought.

He remembered waiting for him to come out of the Townhouse for a last goodbye. Mike had noticed straight away that he was wearing clothes which most certainly did not belong to him. Richie Tozier would never wear anything so drab as a plain grey hoodie, that wasn’t his style. And, even if he found himself in one, he wouldn't have worn it that way. All curled into it, his hands stuffed in the pockets, zipped all the way up to his throat.

Richie had lugged all those extra bags down from Eddie’s room and loaded them into the backseat of his car. The losers did not ask, and did not correct. They had hugged him goodbye, and he had stood against the trunk of his car as every last one pulled away. He didn't wave. He just sort of smiled sadly, and nodded.

Mike had walked back home, leaving Richie to do whatever he needed to do. Although he couldn’t be sure, Mike could have sworn a carving on the Kissing Bridge had darkened by the next day.

And, boom. Richie ‘Trashmouth’ Tozier disappeared.

Mike’s thoughts quieted, and he realized that his legs had taken him where he wanted to be.

“We’re here,” Mike said.

The kids looked at him doubtfully.

Mike laughed to himself, reached down, and felt through the leaves for the handle.

The kids watched him very closely, leaning in together.

Mike, at last, found the handle, and gave it a sharp pull.

With an enormous creaking and shifting, the door lifted off the ground and revealed the dark hominess of the clubhouse. 

Jess took a full two steps back. “Ohmygosh, are we standing on top of it?”

Mike laughed again. “It’s safe! Been here longer than y'all have been alive.” Mike put a hand on his hip. “‘Bout time someone got some use out of it.”

The kids were still for a moment. Wes cocked his head to better peer into the depths of the clubhouse. Jess actually inched forward a bit and squatted to analyze the relative risk involved with entering such a structure.

Rory, at last, burst into a wild grin. “No way! Who built this thing, anyway?” She wasn’t really in the business of waiting for an answer, that one, and merely dove forward to descend into the disused fort.

Mike laughed. “An old friend of mine, Ben. He’s a real wiz.”

Rory poked her head above ground. “Guys, it’s awesome in here! Move your asses!”

Jess was, surprisingly, the first to follow. After her came Flint, then the wary Wes, leaving only Dan and myself standing in the forest.

Dan said nothing. He was staring down at the ground, not in refusal to engage, but some sort of private mourning. Mike knew it well.

“Dan,” Mike said, taking a hesitant step towards the boy.

He looked up. “This doesn’t fix it.”

“I know that.”

“I don’t want to forget.”

“Of course you don’t," Mike said. Of course, of course. "You won't."

Dan looked back down at the ground.

“Hey--” Mike stopped himself, and reached out to tap the boy on the shoulder.

He was clumsy, of course. Mike was no expert in sign language. He knew his alphabet and a few extra words, which is why it took him so long to communicate his message.

_ You lost _ , he managed, only just.

Dan’s brows furrowed in confusion, but he nodded at Mike to continue.

Mike pointed down at the clubhouse door.  _ They find. _

What he meant, of course, was something much more than those words could hold. No one as well-read as Mike Hanlon would ever dare to say something so lazily. But he was doing his best in a language altogether foreign to him. It reminded him of his childhood self-- a boy of very few words, most of them short and more than a little angry.

Dan let a smile grace his dark lips ever so slightly. Message received.

The boy followed his friends down into the clubhouse. Wes had already found the old coffee can filled with shower caps, and was dutifully passing them out. Rory was shaking out the hammock.

Things were as they should be, Mike thought.

As badly as he wanted to sit a moment and trade stories with the youngsters, share tips on how to care for the old place, advise them on the little things which may one day change their lives… Mike knew that this was a journey they should take on their own. You needed that time in transition, in moderate turmoil and confusion, to become as close as him and the other losers. Without the things they had gone through, they certainly would not still be in touch.

Fixing up an old clubhouse couldn’t possibly compare to what the original losers had done, of course. But Mike liked to draw parallels. It was just his way. It made him feel like things were getting tied up, all neatly in a pretty bow, like the ending of a great book.

A quiet and minimal  _ ping _ from Mike’s phone drew him out of his reminiscence. He took his phone out of his back pocket and turned to leave. 

_ Google Alert: Richie Tozier _

Mike’s heart began to pound almost instantly. He could almost feel his palms becoming slick with sweat as he stared down at those words. 

Any good librarian knows how to do proper research. Mike was a very good librarian, and so the things he cared about rarely escaped his attention. He had put his feelers out as the one who wanted to know what had happened to Richie Tozier; some knew why, most didn’t. But all understood the weight of his request, and had sworn up and down to give him the news as soon as they had heard anything.

How funny, he thought, that this last resort could be the messenger of Richie’s fate.

Mike put the phone back in his pocket, for he was certain that reading such news so close to the clubhouse would cause something horrible to occur.

His feet carried him through the woods on autopilot, allowing Mike’s mind to run wild with possibilities. Had Richie been found? Could he be alive? Could he be perfectly okay, the news waiting in Mike’s pocket like some discarded fortune from a Chinese restaurant?

It was dangerous to think that way, though, and Mike knew it.

Perhaps he was dead. Perhaps he had wandered back into the sewer in pursuit of Eddie’s body, and perhaps the losers had been entirely wrong about their defeat of It. Maybe the news was a photo of a pale and bloated body draped over a stone, a few of those evidence markers placed around it like some kind of sick decoration.

Equally dangerous. Mike could feel his breaths quickening.

Maybe it was no news at all. Just one of those periodic updates reminding everyone that Richie Tozier--yes, the Richie Tozier--was still missing. That a reward was still being offered should he be found. That there was still hope, though it grew dimmer by the hour.

At last, Mike emerged from the woods. He now stood beside the drainpipe, his discarded novel still laying in the grass beside it.

Best left discarded, Mike thought. He couldn’t bear to touch it.

Leaning back against the side of the drainpipe, Mike once again retrieved his phone from his pocket.

Press it, Mike.

Go on.

Just press it.

Mike’s fingers were so sticky that he had to wipe his hand on the side of his jeans before daring to open the message.

Open it.

Just open it, coward.

Don’t you want to know?

His clenched his hand into a fist, opened it, and clenched it again. The little nagging voice at the back of his head sounded frighteningly familiar, though he dared not consider that a single moment longer.

Open it, Mikey.

Go on.

You know you want to.

Know you have to.

Mike whacked the message with the force one used to type on an old-fashioned typewriter, nearly knocking the phone out of his hand in the process.

A plain white screen appeared before him, the headline loading in very slowly.

_ Comedian Richie Tozier _

Yes, yes, and?

_ Declared Dead after _

Mike closed the story. He didn’t need to see any more.

He knew exactly how long Richie had been missing, and it wasn’t what the news story said.

The investigators believed that Richie had been missing since the day he left for Derry. He hadn’t contacted anyone, after all. Hadn’t explained what he was going to do. Just up and left, the sudden and powerful memories of his past proving too much for him to possibly care about what his fans thought.

Mike felt tears burning in his eyes and his throat.

He had mourned Richie. Mourned him more frequently than he would have imagined. There was always someone trying to take his place at their family gatherings, trying to jump in with witty-but-vulgar humor, and crass remarks at the littlest things.

And not to be mean, of course. Not to disrespect him, or whittle him down to some bare and one-dimensional cardboard cutout of a person. Just to fill that gaping hole they could all feel melting down to their cores. They had done the same with Eddie and Stan, after all. Tried to remember them as best they could, to bring them up as often as possible. When they did, it was as if the departed were still there. Like their spirits had blessed their gathering, and now hovered above it, watching with warm smiles and full hearts.

But with Richie… it wasn’t the same. There was always some hope that he was still out there, that he would suddenly come home. The unspoken rule was that he could not be mentioned by name, because he was still out there. You couldn’t speak for him if he was still out there to speak for himself.

But they wouldn’t do that anymore.

They would speak of Richie fondly, in the past tense, around the table at Thanksgiving or Christmas. Would tell jokes in his memory. Would add him to the laundry list of people lost in this war that was somehow still raging on.

That voice nagged at Mike again.

You’ll miss him, won’t you?

I won’t give him back.


	3. Ben Hanscom and Beverly Marsh Read the Paper

Ben Hanscom and Beverly Marsh were probably the only members of the Loser’s Club whose lives had measurably improved.

Not that any standard metric of happiness or fulfillment could possibly apply here; it was just that, on paper, the two seemed to be living the high life. A life of speedboats and expensive liquors and engagement rings.

Beverly often found herself idly spinning her engagement ring about her finger. She liked the way it felt. Ben had not bought it, and it did not include a single gemstone. No, Ben--ever the creative, that one--had salvaged the bad chain from Bill’s bike, melted it down, and made Bev’s ring out of a piece of their childhood. Sometimes, late at night, while Beverly’s fingers traced the etched letters on the surface (_january embers_, it said), she could almost hear Bill shouting _Hi ho, Silver! Away!_

That was how Bev and Ben were, in the briefest of terms. Ben was a maker, and Bev was an appreciator. On occasion, Bev would make clumsy attempts to create something of her own, and Ben’s uproarious appreciation could almost make her forget that she used to hate singing, or dancing, or that she had never, in fact, learned to knit properly.

They were this way because they knew each other. In fact, to call what they had ‘love’ was a gross misuse of the word. Bev and Ben were unbreakable, sharing mind and spirit effortlessly.

Ben showed this by being ever so careful to never call her ‘Bevvy,’ as lovely as the nickname may have felt on his lips.

Bev showed this with loving touches and gentle encouragement, always reminding Ben how thoughtful and smart he was, and how lovely it was to see him happy.

These careful turns of phrase or chosen words could only ever be understood by the other losers, though Bill and Mike didn’t often comment on Bev and Ben’s relationship. There was an inherent sadness in seeing the two of them become so close, while Bill’s marriage had decomposed, and Mike had remained so very alone.

The unspoken rule of the losers was to be supportive, no matter what. With everything they had fought through to finally be there for one another, throwing it all away over envy was the stupidest thing anyone could ever do.

And they all still loved each other. That was what mattered.

Ben knew this with a great certainty. It was a universal truth that the losers would always love each other, much in the way that the sun would always rise, or that water would always be wet.

Late at night, Ben would often lay awake and think about that love. With his fiance at his side, twirling her engagement ring around her finger, and thoughts of turtles swimming slowly through his mind, he swore he could feel the warmth of love from each of his friends individually.

Bev’s love was hot a bright. Red, of course. Always there, burning steady.

Mike’s love was a yellow embrace-- not warm, exactly, but surrounding you and squeezing you gently.

Bill’s love was the green light at the end of the tunnel. Something to strive for. Someone to reach.

Eddie and Stan’s love had cooled. It was blue and distant, a memory. Ben could only see it if he looked over his shoulder.

And then there was Richie.

Ben often tried to push Richie out of his mind on nights like these, because thinking about him was just all kinds of wrong. It was wrong to think of him as cold and blue and gone, because he wasn’t. It was wrong to think of him as loud and pink and there, because he wasn’t. It was wrong to think of him at all, because it hurt fresh every night. And it was wrong not to think of him, because he was a loser just like the rest of them.

Beverly’s hand closed over Ben’s forearm, squeezing gently. “Ben?”

“Hm?”

Bev grew quiet for a moment, then said “I was just… thinking.”

“Me too.”

They knew what about. No one had to say.

The drone of the fan filled the room. Ben and Bev lay silently, both thinking precisely the same thoughts. This was the poor side of spending your every day with someone who had been through It, too. Escape was impossible.

“They’ll have to…” Ben cleared his throat. “Well, I mean. They’ll have to decide soon, don’t you think?”

Bev’s grip tightened ever so slightly. “I wish they wouldn’t.”

“I know.”

“I don’t want to go.”

“To a--”

“Yes. We’ll have to go to one,” Bev said. “I don’t know if I can do it. They won’t know Richie. They won’t say the right things.”

Ben nodded. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“And they won’t ask any of us to speak, anyway,” Bev said. “We’ll be some anonymous guests at his--”

“I know.”

“I can’t say it.”

“Neither can I, Bev.”

Silence, again. Neither would bring up hopeful thoughts anymore. No “They might still find him!” and no “It’ll be okay, we’ll be okay.” Those were for a few weeks missing, not nearly fourteen months.

Beverly rolled onto her side and burrowed into her fiance. Ben held her gently.

“I thought it was supposed to be over.”

Ben didn’t say anything.

“I want it to be over, Ben.”

“Me too.”

The standard had failed Ben and Beverly. Standards didn’t capture what had happened to them. Standards didn’t account for growing up in a town like Derry, nor did they consider the nonlinear trend of recovery, and they most certainly did not factor in supernatural phenomenon. No, the standards saw that Ben and Bev had money, a beautiful house, an all-American mutt, and a wedding on the way. The standards dictated that they were happy.

But some things were missing. Late at night, when memories of Eddie and Stan and Richie came flooding back to them, Ben and Bev couldn't help but feel a little like they had in the In-Between time.

A jigsaw puzzle with three missing pieces was still unfinished, even if it was once a jumble in a box.

Their lives were still missing something. Even if they knew exactly what it was.

There was a light thud in the main room.

Everyone jolted. Bev clung to Ben, and Ben clung back. Their dopey but well-meaning dog began to bark.

"Silver, hush!" Ben called, but a dog knows no such word as 'hush' when defending its territory.

Ben squeezed Beverly's hand and swung his feet over the side of the bed. His legs were stiff, his knees unstable, but he hobbled into the front room anyway.

Bev, of course, leapt out of bed and followed right behind.

The two moved quietly through the house and found their dog bellowing at the front door. The first rays of sunlight were peeking out from under the door, and Ben realized that he must not have slept at all last night.

Ben hooked two fingers under her collar. "Silver, shush, shush." He forced the dog to sit down and began to stroke her from head to tail very gently. Sensing Ben's calm, the dog stopped barking.

Beverly moved to a panel on the wall and expertly replayed the security footage from their porch. She had done this many times. You could never be too careful, she thought. Ben agreed.

The security footage only showed the blur of a newspaper being hurled at the door.

"Must've come early today," Beverly remarked.

Ben kept a hold on the dog, and Bev opened the front door.

The low angle of the sun caused the shapes of houses and trees to be projected onto their wood floor like shadow puppets. Beverly took half a step back from the force of the orange light, then shaded her eyes against it.

Silver lunged, hoping to still have a chance at whatever monster had landed on their front porch.

But it was just a newspaper in an unremarkable plastic bag. Suddenly, Ben and Beverly were feeling rather silly.

Bev scooped the paper off the welcome mat and shut the door.

Ben released the dog, who began sniffing around Beverly's ankles. "Wanna go back to bed?" He asked.

Beverly dropped the paper on the table. "I don't think I could. Breakfast?"

Ben smiled. "Sure. Breakfast."

He put a loving hand on the small of Bev's back and lead her towards the kitchen, snatching up the paper on the way.

Ben liked to read the paper, as much as it annoyed Beverly. She liked to talk with Ben in the morning, plan her day or perhaps her whole week. But Ben was so easily fascinated by the happenings in the morning paper, and didn't have the focus to chat about schedules with Bev. They could usually manage a compromise: Ben would be involved in planning the day, and Bev would read the arts section so they could talk about it later.

To imply that this was a true struggle in the Hanscom household is entirely false; in fact, this was probably amongst their biggest frustrations with one another.

Beverly and Ben set about making breakfast, revolving about each other with effortless grace and ease. Coffee, eggs, toast, bacon. Bev liked her coffee black, Ben with tons of cream and sugar. Ben liked his eggs fried and runny inside, Bev liked them scrambled and brown. Bev liked white toast, Ben preferred wheat. No questions or direction required.

While the toaster ticked away, Ben turned to the paper on the counter. He pulled the plastic bag off the outside and let the issue lay flat.

If he'd tried, Ben couldn't pull forth from his memory a single other headline from that day. What stood out to him, as if pulsing against the background of the paper, was one small story down below the fold.

_Comedian Richie Tozier declared dead_

Ben reached out with a trembling hand and lifted the bottom corner of the paper away from the marble. The picture, which was only about half the size of a standard business card, was so grainy that it should have been unrecognizable. But Richie’s light shone through.

“B-Bev…”

Beverly looked over her shoulder. “What’s up?”

Ben turned to look at her, and his eyes said it all.

He reached out with one hand, beckoning her to join him in his sorrow. Beverly all but ran to him. Ben’s arm wrapped around her waist and pulled her in close. They gazed at the article together, reading in stunned silence.

The words did not come as words at all. They were stabs of ideas and places and feelings that couldn’t be communicated in the black-and-white text. Couldn’t be communicated in any text, in fact.

Ben started to cry. He hadn’t meant to. But, before he knew it, the tears were rolling down his cheeks and his chest was shaking in grief.

Beverly cried, too. She clawed at Ben’s shirt in search of a clump of fabric she could squeeze a drop of happiness from.

They stood like this, crying together in the kitchen, for who knows how long. By the time the tears were running out, the sun seemed to have risen in the sky significantly, changing the shadows throughout the house.

Ben thought about how the others must have heard, must be crying somewhere, too.

Bev thought about how she should have hugged him harder, since it was the last time.

In his head, Ben made peace, and extinguished Richie’s pink light. It has always been behind him, peering over his shoulder, poised to drop the perfect joke at the perfect instant and make everything so much better.

Now Richie’s light was blue, and it hovered above them with Stan and Eddie.


	4. A New Ritual

Bill, Mike, Ben, and Beverly stood at the back of the church. It was beautiful, with a high ceiling and stained glass images and probably a lot of other things that the losers had no name for.

Being an architect, Ben should have known a sizeable amount about the structure and the design, possibly something about the history, maybe even been able to point out adjustments to make the building stronger or more elegant. But these facts and opinions all left his head, and Ben found himself staring listlessly at the criss-crossing rafters without much thought.

Similarly, Bev's artistic mind should have felt some pull towards the artistry of the images on display. She had been in less beautiful places that had made her heart pound. But even as the colorful dappled light slid over her face, she wanted nothing to do with it, and dodged it accordingly.

The lilting words of the priest floated in Bill's right ear and out his left. As much as he wished to hang on those words, to think of his dearest and oldest friend Richie in light of their beauty, they were nothing but static in his brain.

Mike stood solemnly. He had already lost his purpose. Now, he stood and watched as another fragment of it was blown away-- or, perhaps "consumed" was the right word here.

"This is c-c-crazy.” Bill shuffled his feet, and looked up at Ben for some sort of approval. “Standing room only?" 

Bev elbowed him. "C'Mon, Bill, shush. We knew what we were getting into."

"Who even are these pe-people?" Bill gestured angrily at the crowd. "Work friends. G-g-glorified work friends."

Mike sighed, and looked around the room. Nothing but not-so-famous celebrities everywhere you looked. "He's not wrong, Bev."

"Quiet," Ben said.

Too far. The group fell silent. 

No one was more upset by this than Ben. Shit like this always hit him the hardest, kind and loving as he was. In the past, he had always tried to be a beacon of hope and light… but it would seem the third unexpected death was the straw that broke the camel's back.

They huddled together the tiniest bit closer, without thinking about it at all. Touch was not forbidden with them. That was nice, Mike thought.

Focus returned to the priest, who was speaking in a clear and gentle tone. His voice carried exceptionally through the room, but was little more than a jumble of sound and echo when it reached the losers at the back.

Not that any of them particularly cared what was said. It was probably nice. It was most certainly off-base. No, this was not a time to listen to the words of a stranger. It was not for comfort.

This was an acknowledgement.

This was when the losers all agreed, albeit silently, that Richie was dead. That it was time to speak of him fondly in the past tense, to consider him a distant blue light in their memories, to enter him in the history books and move on. Time to begin a new ritual, together, and lay dear Richie to rest.

This thought seemed to pass through all of their minds at once. It happened that way, sometimes.

“I miss him,” Bill said.

Ben bowed his head.

Beverly rubbed his shoulder, squeezed it gently. “Me too.”

“Missed him a while now,” Mike added.

Ben stifled a quiet little sob.

And then, just like that, they were all trying very hard not to cry. How funny that it happened that way, don’t you think? Wouldn’t it be nicer if someone could stay strong? Wouldn’t it be easier to hold it all in if you were the only one?

No. It wouldn’t.

The losers clung to each other at the back of the church, shaking with uncried tears. Moderately famous people were turning to look at them, no doubt wondering what on Earth such a rag-tag group of nobodies was doing here, and why they were all crying like babies. 

Richie wasn’t anything special, they all thought. Just another shock-jock-turned-comedian who should’ve stuck to local radio, they thought. Just another person who had gone missing in this terrible, terrible world, and another boring event to attend, they thought. Nothing to cry over, certainly.

How funny that Richie was just on the other side of the wall.

How funny that he, cleverly peering in the window with a mirror, couldn't see the losers tucked back against the wall. 

Funny that Richie thought he had been forgotten.

So funny that Richie had forgotten how to laugh. 

So very, very funny.

Richie tugged on the little strings which dangled from the hood of his sweatshirt. Back and forth, back and forth. This wasn't how he had seen the day going. But, then again, would his plan have worked at all?

How could Richie hope to catch the eye of the losers alone? How could he have thought that they would find him in the chaos? How would he avoid every other attendee?

Maybe, somewhere in the back of his mind, Richie had forgotten that other people would be there.

The memories were funny that way. The Derry chapter of Richie's life seemed twice as bright as the In-Between times-- no, no, a thousand times brighter! So bright and clear and crisp and beautiful. So filled with love and warmth and meaning. 

And so, for such a meaningful event, it would only make sense for people from the brighter times to be there.

But Richie was smarter than that, should have known better. Should have thought things through.

Richie was always smart.

He never got credit for that. Not really. Not in the way that Richie thought he deserved, anyway. Knew he deserved.

He got credit for being quick. Plenty of credit. Verging on too much, to be honest. His jokes always got him yelled at or sighed at or beep-beep’d. His quick wit always beat everyone to the punch, winning him the consistent and coveted title of group jester.

But there were plenty of other types of intelligence, and Richie had a bit of all of them. Not to toot his own horn, of course. To have a quick wit, you have to have a pretty quick mind in the first place, after all. And he could really hold his own against Ben in terms of creativity, another facet obvious in his constant jokes and jibes.

The one no one had ever noticed, though, was how good he was with people. Social intelligence, the experts would have called it. 

Richie definitely had social intelligence. He had social intelligence out the wazoo. How else would you explain him at all? He wasn’t stupid, but there really wasn’t a single “average” things about the boy, either. He had smarts. Just not in the places adults liked to measure.

Socially intelligent people can be good in different places. Some are good at fading into the background, effectively mastering invisibility without magic or science or anything at all. Some are professional and perfect and make people think ‘My, my, what a well-mannered young person, they shall surely be incredibly successful and diplomatic one day.’ Some, like Richie, could traipse about being outrageous buffoons in general and make it all up with a few easy words, or a contagious laugh.

There are undoubtedly many more.

But every socially intelligent person has the ability to understand themselves very deeply, because they can understand everyone else so deeply. Other people are great practice, it seems.

Richie went his whole life--all forty years of it--with this crucial piece of his knowledge missing. As well as he knew the world, he had never taken the time to get to know himself.

This changed, as everything did, when he returned to Derry.

Suddenly face-to-face with his deepest fears yet again, Richie was seeing himself for the very first time. 

Even when he had been a kid, Richie had kept so many secrets from himself. So many dusty corners of his mind were off-limits to his own self-conscious. It was safe that way. 

But now… well, those corners had been illuminated. Now, Richie could see all the things that made him the way he was, had always been.

And he knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that he could never go back.

He couldn’t be a comedian anymore. How had he ever been a comedian in the first place? How had he put himself on display like that? How had he lied and lied and lied every single night, taking convenient pauses for laughter?

He remembered the exact second he decided that.

Richie had been packing his bags, and turned to see Eddie’s luggage sitting at the foot of his bed. He had thought to himself, “What am I supposed to do with all that shit?”

Stupid as it sounded, Richie had almost instantly reached up and put a hand over his heart, clutching at the fabric of his shirt and feeling quite a bit like those oversized travel bags.

“Rich?” Bill knocked on the doorframe, and Richie spun to face him. “We’re gettin’ ready to go.”

Richie, frozen, stared at the carpet near Bill’s feet.

Bill cleared his throat. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah!” Richie blurted out. His hand dropped to his side. “Yes. I’m fine. I was just thinking… well, I don’t know what to do with E-- w-with Ed--”

And he couldn’t make himself say the name. He threw a thumb lamely over his shoulder, in the direction of the bulging bags.

“Oh.” Bill wasn’t sure what to do with himself. He felt inept. “D-d-do you want help?”

Richie shrugged.

“We can get them to your ca-car,” Bill said.

“I don’t want them.” Richie turned away from Bill, but only found himself looking at the bags, and so turned back. “I just want… I dunno.”

But he knew well enough.

“I’ll be down in a sec, okay?” Richie said.

Bill nodded. “Okay, Rich.”

And he was left alone again with the bags. He could almost see Eddie packing them, frantically, unable to stop his motormouth from blathering on and on about whatever disease he was afraid he might contract. The way he must have told off his wife. The way he must have burned bridges and fought through layers of anxiety to come back.

Against his better judgement, Richie approached one of the bags laid out across Eddie’s bed and pulled delicately on the zipper. The bag swelled, and bundles of clothing began to ooze out.

Richie was disappointed to find nothing else amongst the carefully-packed belongings. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected to find in the first place.

As he dug about, his hands grazed a particularly soft hoodie, rolled up and tucked into a corner.

Richie pulled on it. It was well-worn, with threadbare elbows and an overall dingy appearance. Not at all something Eddie would have worn, Richie thought. Wouldn’t be caught dead wearing.

He lifted it to his face and breathed deeply. It smelled like old Eds, that’s for sure.

A distant memory flickered in Richie’s mind. Visiting Eddie when he was sick. The way he had wrapped himself up in a cocoon of blankets; under it all, an old He-Man sweatshirt keeping him warm. His comfort sweatshirt, only for when he couldn’t bring himself to wear something else.

Well. Certainly he had outgrown that old thing. This must have been his replacement. 

Richie slipped the hoodie on. It fit nicely, kind of hugged him in some places.

After the losers had said their goodbyes, Richie got into his car and drove to the Kissing Bridge. He held the sleeve of the hoodie to his face as he drove.

The old carving was still there, a miracle in and of itself. Richie ran his hand over the grooves in the wood. They had faded over the years, but still stood obvious to anyone who looked.

As the blade of his knife traced over the old letters, Richie considered his options. 

He could quit comedy. Publicly. Wouldn't that be something? He'd finally beat that old clown in its game of Truth or Dare.

Or… well, come to think of it, he could remain a comedian and just start writing his own material. Finally. He could tell his outrageously true stories and people would say "Oh, that Richie Tozier and his absurdist humor." That might be nice.

Death was technically an option. It had been an option for Stan, after all. A nice way to escape. Well… not nice. Just a way.

Richie pushed the thought out of his head. Funnily enough, it was the idea of Eddie being angry with him that convinced him he shouldn't.

Not funny at all, really.

Richie closed the knife and tucked it back in his pocket. There was a final option, although it wouldn't be easy.

He could fake it. He could fake his death, and disappear. Live a quiet life up here in Maine where people had never seen his performances or really even heard of him. 

Now that sounded nice.

So that's what he did.

And it had been nice. For a while.

But some things had changed.

Okay, fine. A lot of things had changed. But, then again, maybe very little had changed. Maybe this is how it was meant to be, hm? The losers would split up, but something would always bring them back together. 

“When are you going home?”

Richie froze.The golden haze of his memories faded, and he found himself once again in the dismal, colorless present.

“Tomorrow. I got a hotel room,” Bill said. “You?”

Richie panicked, his feet pedaling madly backwards as he tried to hide himself once again.

“I dunno. I didn’t make plans.” Mike laughed. “That’s not like me at all, is it?”

Bill chuckled in response.

“We can share a taxi to the airport, Mike,” Bev said.

“That sounds good.”

There was a long silence. For a moment, Richie was scared that they had departed, and he had missed his brief chance.

“Ben?”

“That wasn’t right,” Ben said.

More silence.

Then, much softer, “Richie deserved better.”

There was another long quiet--were there always so many long quiets?--punctuated only by what Richie thought might be sniffles. Richie imagined that the group was embracing Ben, comforting him.

“We know it, Ben,” Mike said.

“It was nice, but it wasn’t Richie,” Bev added.

“We n-need to meet,” Bill said quite suddenly.

Mike cleared his throat. “Whaddya mean, Bill?”

“I mean R-Ri-Richie deserves better, and w-we need to give it to him.” Oh, Bill. Always the leader, always steadfast. “We should go back to D-Derry.”

Of course.

There had always been something about Bill, y’know? He was so much more than his own body and soul. There were times when he was simply Bill Denbrough, a writer of moderate fame who was staying in Chicago overnight before flying back home. But there were also times when an entirely different energy flowed through him.

Richie could almost recognize it, sometimes. In a funny way-- like he was recognizing some great king he had read about long ago.

This was one of those times. The force was drawing them back to Derry, as it always would, like a black hole swallowing nearby stars.

The losers agreed. They would return to Derry.


	5. Back to the Barrens

"You do know that campfire smoke is, like, a hundred times more dangerous than cigarette smoke, right?" Eddie said. He wrapped his arms around himself and stood shivering in the night air. "Just sayin' 'cause, y'know, I don't wanna get lung cancer. Thought you guys might feel the same way."

Richie laughed. "Ah, gee, it's a good thing you said so, Eds, 'cause I was thinking about putting my face in there and taking a big ol' puff!"

"Have fun getting black lung, dipshit!" Eddie spat back. “And don’t call me ‘Eds’!”

"Isn't black lung a coal miner thing?" Stan wondered idly.

"Y'know what? The lung turns black either way, so." Eddie crossed his arms harder. He was one of very few people who could pose aggressively.

"Yeah, and whaddya think that inhaler's doing to your lungs? Turning 'em pink?"

"Lungs are supposed to be pink, asshole!" Eddie shrieked. Even at 40, he was a powerful screamer. "Don't even fucking joke about my inhaler, dude, I swear to God! If I breathed in that smoke, I could die, and the only thing keeping my from death is my fucking inhaler!"

Stan glanced over at the squabbling men. "Think you oughta take a puff or two now, Eddie?"

"Fuck you, Stan!"

The three of them could do this for hours. Richie and Eddie squabbling, Stan coolly adding fuel to the fire every so often. They would all bicker and pester one another but, at the end of the day, they had been friends since forever.

Except Stan wasn't there. Stanley Uris had taken a bath, from which he had never risen. Had scrawled the name of his killer on the wall in his own blood. Had never made it back to Derry to once again sigh and roll his eyes at the other losers.

Eddie wasn't there, either. He had never made it out of the sewers. Had never lived in a world without It. Had lost his chance to say goodbye.

And Richie. Richie's absence was fresh and stinging, a pit in the stomach of every loser who now sat around the fire. 

It was genuinely difficult to tell if the pain in their eyes was from the billowing smoke or the uncried tears. Times like these, the full force of everything really hit you. That was just what it was like when you sat around a fire like this. You couldn’t help but just remember everything you’d thought you’d forgotten, feel every feeling you thought you’d buried for good.

Bill took a swig of his beer. He sat with his knees apart, wrist resting on one, the bottle dangling over the forest floor. He sat alone on the ground.

Mike sat alone, too. Arms crossed, leaning back in the little folding chair he’d brought. He didn’t drink.

Ben and Bev sat beside one another on a nearby log. They were close, but not touching. Bev had opened a beer, but Bill had not seen her take a single sip. Ben had brought his own thermos.

Bill couldn’t help but see these things as intricacies of character. That was the writer in him, he thought. Only Bev would open a beer and not drink it, that was just her style. Only Ben would bring his own. But, really, they probably meant nothing at all.

They had been quiet for a long time. Not on purpose, of course. The intention had been to sit and talk and grieve, most importantly, find a way to be okay. To be happy. To laugh, even. To give Richie a send-off that spoke to who he really was. 

But it was hard. It just was.

Bill, leader that he was, could feel the weight of words boiling in his gut. He had to say something. That was his job, wasn’t it? Rally the troops. Say something inspiring and touching and funny all at once. You’re a writer now, Bill. You can do it.

He shifted into a cross-legged position, elbows on his knees, holding his beer with both hands. In his mind’s eye, Richie was holding it to his face like a microphone, going “Testing, testing. This thing on? Gee, with this kinda crowd you’d think someone died.” His eyes would flick from person to person, waiting for someone to laugh. 

No one would, even he had really been there. Not because it wasn’t funny, though.

"I always thought--" Bill stopped himself, licked his lips, and sighed. The other losers looked to him. Please, Bill. For the love of God, speak! "N-not always, that's s-s-stu-stupid. I thought he'd… get out."

Because no one else had. Bill had lost his wife. Mike had tried and failed to leave Derry. Ben and Bev had latched onto one another and wouldn't let go for anything. No one had truly escaped It, had they?

"I thought so, too," Mike said. "But I guess he was just really good at faking it."

Beverly nodded. "He always was. He lied to us about all kinds of things."

"Bev--" Ben reached out towards his fiance.

"No, no! Not in a bad way," Bev corrected. She laughed nervously. "He always wanted us to think he was okay. And it wasn't even selfish. He wanted to be the strong one so that he could protect us."

Bill looked down into his beer. "Yeah… he did protect us, didn't he?"

A murmur of ascent bubbled up from the rest of the group.

"Everything he went through" Mike said. "We didn't even know. He hid it all from us. Told us he was scared of clowns, and we believed him."

There was a long silence.

No one wanted to say it, but the truth hung over them like a heavy stormcloud. 

Maybe, in fact, Richie had been afraid of them. Afraid of rejection. Afraid that he would lose the only friends he had. What must it have been like for him? How terrified must he have been to reveal himself?

The thought gnawed at Bev's stomach. She wasn't altogether unfamiliar with being unable to trust those you loved the most. But at least for Beverly the losers had been her safety. She couldn’t bear to imagine what would have happened to her if she hadn’t been able to trust the boys so completely.

"I'm sure he knows now," Ben murmured. “We’ll always love him.”

“Mm,” Mike agreed.

Bev forced a smile and brushed her hand against Ben’s.

The feeling lurched in Bill’s stomach again. Do something, leader. Say something. Make it better.

He got to his feet very suddenly, almost outside of his own control.

“Bill?” Mike looked up, concerned by the forceful motion.

“A toast,” Bill said. He raised his beer in the air. “To Ri-Richie. Bravest of us all.”

In the silence that followed, the sounds of the woods became so clear in Bill’s ears that he might have been able to notate them on a musical staff. The chirp of crickets on his right and left. The low crackle of the fire before him. The distant whistle of the wind, and the way it rustled the leaves in heaving waves.

Bev stood next. The layer of brown pine needles crunched under her sneakers. She raised her bottle, too.

Ben stood moments after. That was how they were, always following one another. The leader changed, and sometimes they were merely chasing each other’s tails, but it was rare that Ben and Bev were not on the same page.

Mike stood last, after leaning over to get an unopened bottle from the six-pack Bill had brought.

The losers stood in a circle around the fire, holding their drinks in the air and making no move to touch them to one another. It was not a toast that required any more words or any kind gestures. The acknowledgement was power enough.

A new ritual. That’s what this was. The send-off ritual. One that would have to be performed thrice more.

Bev, at last, sipped her beer. Ben and Bill drank from their own vessels. Mike put his bottle back in the cardboard carrier and sat down.

As much as they hated to admit it, something still felt wrong.

No one had even bothered to mention--or, perhaps, no one had noticed--that Bill’s stutter had returned. Should they have? Maybe. Maybe not. These cycles and little nagging hints were becoming, more often than not, background noise in the relentless drone of mental maladies which had inflicted all of them.

"Help!"

Quiet. Distant. Insistent.

In their minds? Yes, yes… must have been.

“Help me!”

Ben looked over his shoulder, towards what he thought was the source of the echoing voice.

"Anyone else hear that?" Mike asked.

The other losers murmured their agreement.

"Help!"

Bill dropped his beer and began to fumble for something--anything--which could be used as a weapon.

Bev and Ben ran to his side, almost fighting over who should protect the other. Bev stood like a stone. Ben raised his fists.

Mike, thinking quickly, grabbed a bottle out of the six-pack and smashed it over his chair. A memory of Richie attempting the same outside of Neibolt flickered in everyone’s minds. A pink flash of camaraderie.

The sounds of thudding footsteps drew ever closer. From the sloppy, light-footed pattern of the running and the high pitch of the pants, they were all certain-- a child.

Mike’s grip tightened around the neck of the bottle.

“Hello?” Bill called.

“It’s Mr. Hanlon!” Mike yelled. “From the library!”

The form of the child, at last, burst forth from behind a tree. Her curly hair stuck out at odd angles from under a red baseball cap, and her baggy shirt had seen better days. She looked up at Mike with such overwhelming hope and relief that he might have been water in a desert.

“Rory!” Mike exclaimed. WIthout a moment’s hesitation, he rushed forward to meet her. Bev, Ben, and Bill shared a look of confusion.

Mike dropped to his knees in front of Rory. His hands reached out to her, as if to cup her face in his hands and examine her, though he dared not touch her directly.

“Shit, Mr. Hanlon, am I happy to see you,” Rory managed between pants.

Mike did his best not to scold. “What is it? Why are you--”

“I just wanted to get m-my stuff, I forgot it,” Rory explained, her voice quaking. “My homework, in my backpack, I left it in the clubhouse-- I should’ve--”

“Rory!” Mike said firmly. The girl had a habit of getting off track and rambly.

“There’s a man,” Rory blurted. “I-in the woods! He wanted to know-- well, shit!”

“Wanted to know what, Rory?” Mike pressed.

Rory pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. “He wanted to know where you were. Fuck!”

“Hey!” Ben couldn’t help it. He had never been one to swear.

Rory looked to Mike, her eyes welling up with tears. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Hanlon, I just heard your voice and I--”

Mike shushed her gently and placed a hand on her shoulder. “You did the right thing. I’m always here for you.”

“Hey, kid!”

Mike’s head snapped up, following the voice of Rory’s attacker. He shooed her towards the rest of the group, and she fell into a protected position behind the three of them.

A bad rash of coughing--outright hacking--ripped through the empty woods. Then, the voice called out again: “Wait up!” Hoarse. Distant.

Mike’s mind kicked into overdrive as he tried to figure out ways to protect the area. There was little to hide behind, less that would actually stop a knife or a bullet. Should he use himself? Should they try to run?

“Mike, I think--” Bill tried to say.

“Quiet!” Mike shot back.

Looking for them? Who could possibly be looking for them? Who could know? Who would have any idea that they were all together, let alone together in Derry? And then… well, to track them into the woods? To ask a child? How could--

“Mike! We need to go!” Bev shouted.

“Wait!” Mike said.

The tugging wrongness. That sense that they had forgotten something, had missed something, was swelling in Mike’s chest. A sense of impending doom came over him, as if a train was barreling towards them through the woods, and something truly terrible would happen when it impacted.

“Guys!” The voice called. Getting more familiar. “Are you there? I can’t find the fuckin’-- whew, shit, there’s a lotta bugs back here.”

Bill took a step backwards. You couldn’t trust a thing like that. It couldn’t be, simply could not be who it sounded like.

And then… Well. He was there.

He stood only a few yards from them, having stumbled out from the darkness as suddenly as one could possibly imagine. So much like a poor middle-schooler being pushed out on stage during a school play. 

His dirtied brown jacket was stiff in all the wrong places, baggy in all the wrong places, and altogether an ugly waste of fabric. Under it, the thin grey hoodie he had worn nearly every day for the past year, zipped up to his throat. While the brown jacket had acquired many new stains and scuffs since the losers had seen it last, the hoodie had somehow frozen in time.

The scruff which covered his face had gotten slightly more out of control since they had last seen him. Not much, mind you-- just enough to be noticeable in the dancing light of the fire. Although, despite this, he seemed to be more put together. Despite all of it, in fact. So much more sure of himself. He stood a little taller. His presence felt weightier. Perhaps that was unfair under the circumstances, but it seemed to all the losers that he had, at last, grown up.

“Richie!” Beverly was the first to break, the name falling from her lips in a harsh sob.

Richie’s mouth twitched up in a little grin. “Hiya, Bev. Long time, no see, right?” He pulled one hand out of his jacket pocket and waved awkwardly. “Hey, Ben. Bill. Mike.”

Ben wheezed something that was probably meant to be “hi,” though it didn’t seem to quite have enough intention behind it.

Richie took a step forward, and everyone else took a step back.

Richie’s face fell.

“W-wait!” Bill held a hand up. “If you’re really Ri-Ri-Richie, tell us something o-only he would know.”

Richie’s slapped his thigh with one hand. “Fuck!” He rolled his head back. “Y’know, I knew you guys were gonna do that, and I told myself ‘Richie, you’d better think of something good,’ and I just… well, I just…” His voice faltered and broke off.

Mike’s shoulder visibly relaxed. “Rich…”

Richie swallowed hard, sniffled harder. “I just… I couldn’t…”

Now he was crying, bawling, like a little kid. It had been a while since any of them had done anything like a little kid. But there he was, standing stock still and sobbing his eyes out in the middle of the woods, rubbing his face with the too-long sleeves of his hoodie.

“I missed you!” Richie exclaimed.

Mike looked back at the losers, who were still diligently guarding poor Rory.

It was him. It had to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for your patience, everyone!! I've had this chapter written since early October, and literally been too busy to hit post.... Hope you all enjoyed it! See you next week!


	6. The Door Opens

It’s amazing how quickly all rational thought can leave one’s mind. 

Bill supposed that it was something like hysterical strength-- when adrenaline can make the human body do incredible things, all because you or someone you love is in danger. This must have been much the same because, while Bill’s legs carried him forward, he was not willing himself to do so. What must that be called? To be so overwhelmed with emotion that one has no control over their own body?

While Mike was certainly speaking, he could not fathom what words were pouring out of his own mouth. He had often imagined that he would see Richie again, and he always had something lovely to say in his mind. He hoped to God that some of them were being said now.

Beverly could hardly see through her tears, but rushed forward nonetheless. That was Richie, the brother she’d never had, her protector, the boy who loved her so purely and made her feel so welcome. Surely, once her arms were around him, she would know for sure.

And Ben, dear old Ben, could do nothing but stand still. He had always been the most empathetic, the kindest, the gentlest… and right now all he could think about was how badly he wanted to remember this moment forever. He had lost his chance last time. This time, though. This time he’d never forget when he saw Richie again.

Mike collided with Richie first, wrapping around him in a bear hug that nearly toppled the both of them over.

“Whoa, Mikey!” Richie exclaimed, his voice thin after the air had been knocked out of him so thoroughly. He reached around, though, and gave Mike some strong pats on the back.

Beverly rushed in next, clinging to Richie’s arm and burying her face in his shoulder. Richie chuckled and ruffled her hair with his free hand.

Bill came in from the side and pressed his forehead into Richie’s, wrapped an arm around his shoulders.

“Hiya, Big Bill.”

Bill pulled away and sniffled. “Ri-Ri--” A sob interrupted. “Ri-- I-I--”

“Hey, hey,” Richie murmured. He clasped one hand around the back of Bill’s neck, and drew them back together. “I hear ya, Bill.”

Bill nodded, then collapsed into Richie’s shoulder.

Still waiting for the moment to stop being so picture-perfect wonderful, Ben stood still a few yards away. 

Rory was right behind him. She watched silently.

Richie looked up and locked eyes with Ben. The two stared at each other for a long time, really and honestly doing nothing other than looking. Not looking for anything. Not trying to prompt an answer. Just seeing.

“C’mon, Haystack,” Richie called. “What are you waiting for?”

But Ben did not move.

Richie’s face turned stony. “Ben?”

“Where were you?”

The losers began to draw away from Richie, the question echoed in their own eyes.

“Ben, I--”

“You disappeared,” Ben said. A lump was rising in his throat, but he fought it down. “You let us think you were-- how could you, Richie?”

Richie’s arms fell to his sides. He had this way of standing that made him look like a cardboard cutout, like he was faking his personhood, had been faking it all along. Like he had expertly painted an outrageous personality over something he wasn’t ready for other people to see.

“Rich?” Bill prompted.

But he was looking past Ben. Ben looked back over his shoulder and saw Rory shrinking away, folding into her clothes, yet never breaking eye contact with Richie.

“Who is that?” Richie asked. His voice was dark.

Mike followed Richie’s gaze. “Th-that’s Rory. She’s-- well, I know her from--”

“Why is she out here?” Richie demanded. He locked eyes with Mike. “Did you tell her something?”

Now it was Mike’s turn to cringe away from Richie. “She’s just a kid, Rich.”

Richie squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. Shook it harder. He put his hands against his temples and just kept shaking his head, harder, harder, harder--

“Richie!” Beverly grabbed his wrist with incredible force and halted Richie’s panic. “She’s just a kid!”

“There’s no such thing as ‘just a kid’ in Derry!” Richie shot back. “And not in Castle Rock, and not in Bangor, or Haven, or Chester’s Mill, or Chamberlain, or-- I mean, Jesus, Mike, could you be more stupid?”

And now it was starting to show through. The deeper Richie, that is. The paint was peeling off, had probably been peeling off for the past year. He was… bedraggled. And not in the way that Richie usually was. The Richie the losers had known was a little rough around the edges, maybe, but still whole. This Richie was broken. Beaten down. Defeated.

“Rory?”

“Yeah, Mr. Hanlon?” Rory replied, her voice shaking.

Mike held his gaze with Richie. “Why don’t you run on home?”

“But I--”

“Now, Rory.”

The poor girl took a few steps back, then turned and departed at a jog.

Richie was breathing heavily, his chest heaving and wheezing. He swallowed dryly with great difficulty. Beverly was still holding his wrist.

“Rich--”

“We need to talk,” Richie blurted. “I-- we need to talk.”

Bill nodded. “I th-think we do.”

Richie bit down on his lip at the sound of Bill’s stutter.

The losers walked in total silence through the woods and back to Mike’s car. The Barrens didn’t seem quite as big as they once were, for they were older now, their strides longer. Even without words, the distance closed quickly.

Ben, Bev, and Bill piled into the back. Richie sat in the front with Mike.

As they drove, Richie rested his temple against the window. The streetlights passed over his face, illuminating wrinkles that hadn’t always been there. Little scars that were still fresh. A tiredness in his eyes, but also a flickering fear. No longer internal, as it had been when they were kids. This was external; a fear for everyone around him.

Ben began to cry as they drove. He couldn’t help it. Beverly stroked his arm gently and murmured thoughtful things, but there was very little to say.

Mike drove them to the library. He had the key, after all. It seemed like the right place to talk.

Feed the cycle, Mikey.

You know you want to.

Know you need to.

Let it happen.

Mike could do very little to force the voice out of his mind. It was loud an insistent and not at all his own. He could yell at it to stop all he wanted, plug his ears, or hum a tune… but the voice was in him, and wouldn’t stop for anything.

The door to the library groaned open, and Mike flicked each light switch on in series. Fluorescent light flooded the large room from front to back. For a moment, it seemed as if the library might stretch on forever.

But it was just a simple building, and Mike held the door open for his friends to enter.

Bill passed with his head down. Then Ben and Bev, Beverly leading the way with Ben right on her tail. And, last of all, Richie.

As he passed Mike, his eyes flicked up. Only for an instant. Blink-and-you-miss-it.

The losers arranged themselves at a table near the center of the room. It was round, meant for studying or group meetings or… Well, Mike wasn’t really sure what it was for, exactly. All of those things required you to speak, and Mike often found himself shushing the occupants of this particular table as their voices climbed steadily up from a whisper.

Richie sat between Mike and Bill. None of them could look at each other.

Ben and Beverly were across from them all. They both looked at Richie with some kind of strange apprehension; not fear, exactly. Not fear that it wasn’t Richie in there. Fear that it was. Fear that this was who Richie was now, no trace of the boy they had once known.

“Well?” Mike said, breaking one of the longer silences the losers club had known.

Richie cleared his throat. His hands were folded on the table, and he just stared down at them with a foreign intensity.

“Y-y-you wanted to t-tell us some-something,” Bill managed. His stuttering seemed to be worsening by the minute.

Richie nodded, eyes still burning holes into the backs of his hands. “Yeah.”

Silence.

“When…” Richie shifted in his seat. The chair creaked. “When you all left. I decided that I… couldn’t.”

Mike set his jaw, trying very hard not to say anything.

They knew why, of course. It wasn’t because he felt like it. It was because he had remembered, and was now cursed with the memory of a lost love that, really, he had never even had in the first place.

“It started out as just… needing some time to think,” Richie said. He paused, running his hand through his hair, a quaking and rough motion. “I think. Maybe. I don’t know.

“Anyway, I bummed around a while. It was easy up here because--” his nervous laughter broke through for a moment “--well, because nobody up here knows who the fuck I am, right? I was just like anybody else. It was nice, y’know?

“I wanted to go to Castle Rock because… well, see, I don’t really know. I thought that-- Jeez, I mean, I thought that it was the right place to be. I started getting all kinds of weird feelings about where to go, who to talk to, what to look out for. And I just… I saw things.”

Ben leaned forward slightly. “What kinds of things?”

Richie shook his head again. He thought he could clear that thing like an etch-a-sketch, if only he shook hard enough. “Like I said, I-I-I just followed my gut and ended up places. I tried to, um, to write down things when I saw them ‘cause I was scared that-- well, y’know.”

Richie dug his hands into his pockets and pulled out crumpled slips of paper, dumping them on the table. Then he reached into the inner pockets, and revealed more… more and more, for every pocket he had, piles upon piles of paper with messages scrawled on them. They stacked up in two distinct drifts on the table-- one from his right hand, one from his left.

Bill reached out and took a receipt from the pile closest to him. “Thin man, no one saw,” he read.

Richie nodded. “Th-this guy, right? He was so thin-- I’m talkin’ should-have-been-dead thin, and people just-- just walked right through him. Like he was a ghost. I-I looked right at him and he got all scared, I--”

“Creepy escaped prisoner…” Mike read, his tone incredulous.

“Th-that was this guy who came out of Shawshank. This kid. People said he’d been down there for ages, but he looked like he couldn’ta been more than 30. He-- he was just out wandering the streets and staring into people’s houses! I mean-- fuck!” Richie pounded a hand on the table.

Ben reached in next, drew out a napkin. “‘Growing house.’ C’mon, Rich.”

“No construction! It just-- It just grew on its own every time something bad happened!” Richie was beginning to look crazed, now. His eyes were glowing with a kind of inhuman frenzy. “Y-you don’t believe me, do you?”

That cold and dark wave of fear washed over the table. It tugged at Mike’s stomach, and clenched Beverly’s heart in its freezing embrace. Richie, their Richie, had changed. Something inside the man had just snapped. It’s a miracle it hadn’t happened sooner.

“Rich…” Beverly reached out and took Richie’s hand. “Listen. It’s not that we don’t believe you, honey. We’re… we’re worried that you being on your own for so long has caused you--”

“No.” Richie shook his head, yanked his hand away. “No, no, don’t do that. Don’t you fucking talk to me like I’m some dumb kid. You hated me for that when I did it to Bill, remember? Don’t you fucking do that.”

Bev retreated.

“Hey,” Ben said sternly. “Listen, man, we’re trying to help you out here but-- well, Jesus, Richie! You disappeared for a year! We thought you were--”

The table fell silent.

Richie’s eyes shifted downwards.

Ben took a deep breath. “What makes you think that this is even our problem, hm?”

Richie’s chest started to heave again. He was on the verge of tears, no doubt about it. Worse, his trust was dwindling. They could all see it, bubbling just under the surface. He was losing faith in the losers.

But then something sparked. Richie turned to look at Bill, really look at him. He reached out and pointed at Bill’s chest, gave him a jab with his pointer finger right over his heart.

“You felt it. Right? You felt it right here,” Richie said. “L-like someone was pulling you in the right direction. Telling you what you had to do. F-for Georgie.”

The losers stared at Bill.

Bill blinked. He paused for a long time, watching as Richie’s eyes darted across his face. “Y-yes.”

A smile broke through for a moment. “I feel it now, too, Bill.”

The weight of the admission hung in the air thicker than fog.

“For…” Bill swallowed. “For Eddie?”

Richie nodded.

Bill nodded, too. “Where?”

Richie’s smile returned. “That’s the funny thing.”

Mike eyed him suspiciously.

“Not funny-funny,” Richie corrected. “Christ, Mike. It’s in Derry.”

“What is?” Mike asked.

Richie took a deep breath, then let it out. “I could tell you. But I think you’ll understand it a little better if I showed you.”


	7. Diner

Richie could almost hear Eddie’s voice in his ear as the losers pulled up to their next destination. “Couldn’t have taken us here first, Rich? Or are we just doing the whirlwind tour of Derry? God, I need my dramamine… being stuck in the car with you all is making me sick!”

The diner had been around for a long-ass time, that’s for sure. And that wasn’t a judgement based on looks (though it could have been), nor was it based on odor (though it most definitely could have been). 

No, there was another sign. It was all too easy for the losers to imagine the way the busted neon sign look all lit up. Too easy to imagine the tinkling sound the bell made over the door. Too easy to catch a whiff of sizzling bacon and warm, soft pancakes on the air. 

It was called  _ Al’s _ . The sign had said  _ Al’s Diner _ , though it was now missing most of its letters, and said something closer to  _ Ale _ . Each little crevice and seam in the building was stuffed with the curling tendrils of quick-growing ivy. The windows were dark and boarded over. The outer walls, which had once imitated the bright sheen of chrome, now were grimy and dull. The bell above the door was silent. The kitchen was still and cold.

“Oh, my God,” Bev murmured. “I-I… I remember!”

Richie slammed the car door. “Jesus, I was hoping you’d say that. I was kinda thinking, like,  _ oh, what if I’m the only one who remembers it, maybe no one else even went,  _ y’know? Did we ever go together? I mean I went with-- well. Nevermind.” Richie stuffed his hands in his pockets. He had said enough about all that, he thought. “Did we? Go together?” 

Bill walked up to the three steps which lead into the establishment and sort of ran his shoe over the edge of the first stair. “Huh. I think I came here once with St-St-St--” Bill stopped, shook his head, and jammed his fists into the pockets of his much-too-fashionable jeans. “Afterschool. Something about the B-B-Boy Scouts.”

“Richie, isn’t this where you and I traded cards?” Bev asked, running a hand over one of the windows.

Richie slapped a hand to his forehead. “Holy shit, that’s right!” He laughed, a rare sound these days. “You swindled me out of my Cal Ripkin!”

Bev whipped her head around to look at Richie, her eyes dark and mischievous. “Not as often as you swindled me, Trashmouth.”

Ben couldn’t help but laugh. He loved hearing about all the ways Richie and his fiance had gotten themselves into trouble as kids. They were like brother and sister-- no, like twins. Bev was the only one who could match Richie’s stamina at the arcade, and the only one who always agreed to his outrageous schemes. It was good to know that her childhood had a bright spot, however small it might have been beside the sea of darkness that was her home life.

“Hey, Mikey,” Richie looked back over his shoulder. “You remember the diner?”

Mike scoffed. “Of course I do.” His hands were in his pockets, too. His face was stony. 

“Shit. Yeah, I guess so.”

Mike shrugged. “There’s, uh, nothin’ special about it. Nothing real bad ever happened here or anything. What exactly were you going to show us?”

Richie held up a finger. “Right.” He turned, pointed at Bill. No, past Bill, to the door. “It’s inside.”

“You went in there?” Ben asked. “Didn’t it look… I mean, it didn’t turn old and abandoned overnight.”

Richie waved it off. “Yeah, I broke into-- I mean… I  _ went _ into an abandoned diner. As if that’s the weirdest place I’ve been. C’mon,  _ vamanos, amigos _ !” He began to peddle his arm in a wide circle, leading the losers towards the door in the manner of an over-enthusiastic museum docent.

Bev went first, giving her Richie a playful punch on the shoulder as she went by. Then Ben and Bill.

Mike still stood behind the car.

Richie’s arm fell to his side as he considered what he might say. “Mike--”

“You told me you wouldn’t,” Mike said.

Richie’s eyes narrowed. “I… what?”

Mike sighed. “You told me you wouldn’t do what I did,” he said. “It hurts too much, Rich.”

Richie winced a bit, as if he’d been struck. “I n-never said that.”

Mike’s hand shot to his forehead, and he pinched the skin there together as if it might arrange his thoughts more clearly. “You didn’t say it, Rich, you-- But you  _ told _ me. You told me how much it hurt when you came back and had to remember everything you left behind, and now you-- you turn around and do the same damn thing!”

“I didn’t--”

“I love you, Richie,” Mike said. “I always have and I always will. But I’m angry with you. We should have been with you on this.”

Richie opened his mouth to respond, then closed it. Once more; open, closed. “I’m sorry, Mike.”

“I don’t accept your apology. I thought you were better than this, than looking for distractions.” Mike’s tone was firm and biting. “We should have been with you.”

Richie swallowed. He was suddenly feeling very small as he stood with his back against the outer wall of the diner. “I-I… I know.”

Mike nodded. Once, very sharp. “Now, let’s take a look at what you found. Better be good.”

Richie let a hesitant smile creep back onto his face. Mike may have been a man of harsh principles, but he did love Richie. He loved all of them. It would be okay.

“It is, Mikey. I promise it is.”

Mike nodded again.

The two losers entered the diner. The little bell was totally rusted out, but still made a hollow clattering sound as the door smacked it about.

Bill, who had been behind the counter examining the old pie case, turned to look. He didn’t say anything. That was because he was in observation mode, Richie supposed; an abandoned diner with a mysterious secret would be marvelous inspiration for a new novel.

Bev was fussing over Ben, but in that quiet way she had. She wasn’t a fusser, after all. She was a protector. A protector who was occasionally driven to fuss.

Richie was doing something weird with his hands. Something loud and weird, like clapping or snapping or that terribly bizarre combination of both things. He was huffing and sighing and trying desperately to do-- well, to do something. As usual, he wasn’t sure what. Somehow, being a hermit had made his people skills even worse.

“Rich?” Mike put his hand on Richie’s shoulder and squeezed.

Richie’s chest caved in. “Y-yeah. The-- right.”

“Was that even a sentence?” Bev asked. Ben shushed her. Not yet. No jokes yet.

Richie stalked through the diner, his head down and footsteps appearing more purposeful than they ever had. He pushed through the silver double doors and into the kitchen. The other four losers, after a confused moment of silence, piled in afterwards.

The kitchen was in as much disarray as the dining space, if not more. Piles of abandoned pots and pans covered most surfaces. Some of the cabinets were flung open and rifled through, a clear sign of scavengers from long before the losers. Mike had to admit his own hands were itching to nab one of the industrial-sized pots. He liked to make his own soup.

Richie was standing beside the door to the pantry. His hands were folded in front of him. His head was bowed.

Bill put his hands on his hips. “Am I missing something?”

“It’s in here.” Richie patted the doorframe leading to the pantry.

The losers looked at him. A ragtag, incomplete group which should have been every color of the rainbow and was coming up short.

“What’s in--”

“Look.” Richie’s hand sliced through the air decisively and cut Bill off. “I followed It-- not  _ It _ It. A different It. A-a good one! Not good exactly…”

“An O-Order,” Bill said. “To the Chaos.”

Richie snapped his fingers. “Yes! Like a yin-yang deal. I followed the other one to this diner, and it told me to go into the pantry.”

“Jesus, Rich, there isn’t even a light in here,” Ben said, peering into the darkened closet. “How the hell do we know what’s in there?”

“It’s not what’s in the pantry,” Richie said. “It’s what’s behind the pantry.”

Mike’s eyes narrowed. “Like a secret door?”

“Just go in, would ya?” Richie asked.

“All of us?” Bev asked. “Will we fit?”

Richie laughed dryly. “I think there’s more than enough room for you Losers.”

Bill shook his head. “Rich, I swear to G-God, if this is so-some kinda joke--”

“Bill?” Richie said. “All due respect, just shut up and get in the fuckin’ closet.”

Mike was the first. He pushed to the head of the group and entered the pantry, looking a bit like a parent checking under their child’s bed for monsters. The other losers listened as Mike’s footsteps receded further, further… far deeper into the pantry than they thought should be possible. Mike muttered something under his breath, the words incomprehensible by the time they echoed out to the door.

Bev locked eyes with Richie, silently asking for an explanation. That old, familiar, mischievous look in RIchie’s eyes had returned, and he denied Beverly’s request. She plunged into the pantry after Mike, Ben hot on her tail.

Bill was gripping the doorframe and leaning into the dark room-- or perhaps ‘corridor’ was more apt. His eyes scanned the dark space in the hopes that they would adjust to the lowered light.

“Hate to tell ya, Big Bill,” Richie said, his hand clasping his friend’s shoulder, “but you won’t be able to see. I stood in there for a good ten minutes with the door shut, pointing my phone screen at shelves ‘n’ shit… you can’t see to the back.”

“Richie?” Bev’s voice. “Richie, where’s the back? We can’t see!”

Richie’s eyebrows twitched upwards. He thumbed into the pantry and looked at Bill, as if saying  _ See? I’m not pulling your leg, Big Bill. _

Bill swallowed hard. His excellent imagination was more of a curse than a blessing at times like these; his mind was already spinning with what might be found at the back of this stupid, dark room. A body? A monster? Some other cosmic horror of which he could hardly conceive? Some other terrible mind battle with a being from beyond our universe?

But he plunged in.

“‘Atta boy, Bill,” Richie whispered.

Bill’s hands pawed at the air in front of him, his feet shuffling along the floor in overly-careful steps. The darkness consumed him. He was losing more than his sight, too; Bill felt as though hands were clasped over his ears, that some unseen mist was settling onto his skin. He was feeling remarkably claustrophobic.

“Mike?” He called into the darkness. “Bev? Ben? Wh-where are you?”

He should have reached them by now. Should have been out the side of the diner by now, he thought. Unless his senses were thrown off by this stupid pantry, which seemed likely.

In fact, he thought he could smell something strange and foreign. Nothing that should have been in a pantry, that’s for sure. Something outdoors-y. Fresh-cut grass?

Yes, now that you mention it, there was something of a breeze grazing his cheek.The smell of the grass, and he could have sworn he heard music.

It was as if he had broken through the side of a bubble. The darkness was gone in an instant, taking with it the sense of smothering closeness. It was as if he had woken from a dream by falling out of bed, opening his eyes against the light of the morning sun.

“Shit!” he shouted, in his shock and discomfort. He immediately tripped over his own feet and hit the grass face-first.

“Bill!” Ben’s voice. He sounded… giddy.

Bill spat into the dirt. “Ben?” He could hardly open his eyes, the sun was so bright. Hadn’t it been night when they’d gone into the diner in the first place?

It smelled bright and clean and new-- but old at the same time. It was like a direct hit of nostalgia for Bill. He could hardly describe what he was smelling other than grass and dirt, but it was somehow deeper than that. More special. More specific.

And the music. It was distant, tinny, but recognizable to any kid who had grown up in the 1980s. Twinkling synths, powerful chords on the piano, and perhaps one of the greatest anthems known to teens of the time:

_ Teenage Wasteland… It’s only Teenage Wasteland… _

“Bill, are you alright?” Mike’s voice cut through the other sounds--lawnmowers, children shouting, roaring car engines with no mufflers--and finally grounded Bill. “That was quite a spill.”

Bill groaned lightly and began to get to his feet. “What the he-hell was that?” He asked.

“Not sure yet,” Bev said. “Did Richie come through?”

“He didn’t s-s-seem to be following.” Bill was examining his palms. His hands stung from the force of the fall, but seemed to be suffering from nothing other than grass stains.

It was right then that Bill’s stomach dropped. His head snapped up, and he grabbed Mike’s arm with great urgency.

The other losers seemed to feel it, too. Some kind of pull, or perhaps a push.

“Slow down, Bill!” screamed an all-too-familiar--if long forgotten--voice. “Your stupid old lady bike’s too fast for us!”

The sound of bicycles approached, playing cards clicking along the spokes at utterly magical speeds. There must have been three… no, four bikes coming down the street. The giggles of mischievous boys could be heard even from here.

Then, without a stutter to be heard: “Hi Ho, Silver! Away!”

And they shot past. Bill, Stan, Richie, and Eddie. No older than fourteen, and all just as they were in the first week of that fateful summer.

“Told you,” Richie said.

He was standing behind the four of them, his hands stuffed in his pockets, grinning from ear to ear. Bill could almost see the young Richie standing before him-- that round melon head, those toothpick arms, that trashmouth that never quit. All clad in some terrible Hawaiian shirt, which the now-Richie still seemed to be wearing.

Bill scoffed. “T-t-to-told us what?!”

“That you wouldn’t believe me.” Richie’s smile intensified for a moment. His nose wrinkled, and his glasses crept up his face. “We have a second chance.”


	8. Second Chance

Bill skidded silver to a halt on a dime. The bike nearly toppled over, threw him off like a bucking bronco, but his sneakers found the pavement and he was able to steady himself.

"Whoa!" Richie hit the brakes, too, so as not to crash into his friend. His glasses flew off his face and landed in front of his own bike's tire. "What the fuck, Bill? Are you that angry about the old lady bike thing?"

Eddie's bike shot out from under him and hit the street, though he remained miraculously on his feet. "Are you serious, Richie? Just gonna leave your fuckin glasses in the street? What if someone steps on those?"

"You're wearing shoes," Stan pointed out. He had stopped his bike with very little effort, and already flicked the kickstand down with the toe of his own sneaker. "I don't think it would hurt you."

"It doesn't matter that we’re wearing shoes, Stanley! Do you have any idea how much glasses cost?"

Richie snorted in laughter. "What are you, my accountant? Besides. I think I look handsome without those stupid glasses."

Richie beamed, bright as the sun, showing off the roundness of his cheeks and the youthfulness of his eyes. Somehow, without the downright magnificent magnification properties of his glasses, he somehow looked even younger. It was as if the corners of his frames were the only right angles the boy had above his shoulders.

As Eddie spluttered through some sort of comeback, Stan left his bike and went to stand beside Bill. This was how it tended to be with the four of them; Eddie and Richie bickering, Bill and Stan in quiet focus.

"What is it, Bill?" Stan asked.

Bill was squinting at a group of adults across the street. "I dunno… do y-you know them at all?"

Stan studied the ragtag group of nobodies. There were five of them, four of which had some pretty significant grass and dirt stains on their clothes. Their clothes looked… well, they looked like the kinds of things teenagers wore, not grown-ups. Flannels and button-ups on the men, and one woman in a flowery tank top and black jacket. But these adults were easily their parents' ages. What were they doing wearing clothes like that?

"No," Stan said. *No, I don't think I've ever seen them before."

Bill frowned. "I got a w-weird feeling. Th-they don't seem… ri-right."

Stan looked again. One of the men--short, with a streak of grey in his hair--was dusting himself off from head to toe. When he looked up and made eye contact with Bill, the man actually reached out to grab one of the other men's shirt sleeves.

Bill, almost without knowing, did just the same thing to Stan.

The man who had been grabbed seemed unbothered. He grinned and adjusted his massive glasses. "Hey, kids!" he shouted across the street. "What are you guys up to?"

The woman actually shushed him.

The man shrugged. "What, Bev? I'm just talking to the kids."

The woman--Beverly--looked back over at Bill in what could only be described as utter horror.

"Uh…" Bill's brain seemed to be working overtime. "We're going to the Qu-Quar-Quarry."

The man gave Bill a thumbs up, then turned to the woman. "See? They're going to the Quarry." Now, with his attention back on the kids, he shouted "You be careful down there, okay? Look out for poison ivy!"

Richie sniggered again. "Did that guy just tell us to be careful?"

Stan wrinkled his nose. "I didn't know there would be poison ivy."

"Th-there's no po-poison ivy, St-Stan," Bill said.

Eddie scoffed. "That's what you think. There's poison ivy everywhere, Bill. Did you know that if you don't wash your skin after you touch it you can get, like, really bad fevers and sweat and stuff? And if you wait too long it spreads to your dick! And it gets all warty and rashy and--"

"I… don't think that's true, Eddie," Stan said.

"It is, too. I read it in your boy scout manual."

Stan turned to look over his shoulder at Eddie. "You took my boy scout manual?"

"They're just st-standing there," Bill said.

The boys returned their attention to the adults standing in the empty lots across the street. In a way, it was like they were looking in a mirror-- each seemed to be just as confused as the other, with the exception of the man in the glasses. He looked happy, almost excited.

Richie was the first to move. He bent down to pick up his glasses off the pavement, gave them a half-assed wipe on his shirt, and stuck them back on his face. "C'mon. Let's go to the Quarry. Those guys are freaking me out."

"Me too," Eddie chimed in. "They're looking at us weird."

"Do you think they're the ones…" Stan trailed off before he could decide on the right word. Kidnapping? Killing? Something worse? "You know."

Bill didn't respond, just made himself comfortable on Silver and pushed off. The other losers were right behind him. Richie lingered a moment longer, looking into the eyes of the man with the glasses. He saw something strange there, but not exactly scary… more like sad. Or maybe hopeful. But, then, you would have to be sad first to be hopeful at all. So maybe both.

But even Richie gave up and pushed off, bicycle cards clicking slowly against the spokes of his wheel.

As the boys disappeared around the bend, the adult losers let out a collective breath.

"Jesus Christ, tell me we didn't just f-f-fuck something up," Bill spat.

Richie chuckled lightly. "What, you think I'd like you just blunder in here without a big fuckin' undo button? I know I'm not exactly the smartest guy but you must think I have shit for brains, Big Bill."

"How do we get back?" Ben asked. He was already looking panicked, feeling along the ground in some sort of bizarre search for an escape hatch. "Rich, how do we get back?"

Mike did not move or speak, but was breathing very heavily, nearly dry-heaving into the dirt.

It was only Beverly who looked at Richie with anything remotely resembling positivity. Her eyes were fixed on Richie's, looking for answers or help or even just something she recognized, but not yet finding it.

The weight of what Richie had done hit him hard in the chest. He remembered his first time through, after all. What a desperate place he had been in, how much he had hoped for something as fantastical as this, and yet it still had felt like getting whacked over the head with an aluminum boat. Everything he had already unloaded on his friends… all the emotions he had put them through, and at top speed. And now he does this?

"Shit," he said. His face crumpled. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, guys, I-- let's go back."

Mike was clutching his chest now. Ben looked at Richie hopefully.

"Fuck, I'm an idiot. Let's go back." Richie started to wander around the clearing, looking at the ground. "It should be right over--"

That was not a sound or breath of wind. One second Richie had been there, the next he was gone. It was as if he had never been there in the first place.

Beverly ran after him, and the same happened to her. Then Ben. Then Bill and Mike.

Richie watched his friends as they came stumbling out of the dark closet and into the eerie green atmosphere of the abandoned diner. The more he thought about it, the more his stomach sank. He felt like he was back in high school, like he had ruined his shot with the cool kids by doing some stupid impression at the lunch table that nobody got. Except it was worse, because these people were supposed to like him no matter what. This should have been a blank slate (well… mostly blank), and he had already scribbled all over it in permanent ink.

Beverly pulled a chair out from one of the grimy tables and sat down. She almost immediately folded her arms over the tabletop and put her head down in it.

Ben passed her, rubbed her shoulder, and sat in a chair beside her. He seemed a little more wary of the table's surface, and opted for sitting back with his hands in his lap.

Bill was shaken up pretty badly, having made eye contact with his much-younger self. Bill had always been sensitive to those sorts of things, after all. As if more of those sorts of things existed… but, then, with the losers they always did. Somehow meeting their younger selves wasn't automatically the strangest thing they had done.

All the same, Bill found his way to the table and flopped down into the chair across from Bev.

Mike was last. He had composed himself (to some extent) and collapsed into the chair between Bill and Bev.

Richie waited patiently for any of them to say anything, but the diner was silent. After a moment's pause, he pulled up a chair at the corner between Bev and Mike. He kept a respectful distance from the table, however; about two feet between himself and the rest of his friends.

Bill raked his hands through his hair. "What the f-f-fuck, Ri-- R-Ri--" He fought with the word for a moment, then smacked the palm of his hand on the table. "The fuck, man!"

"Okay," Richie nodded. "Yeah. Good note. Mike? You have anything to add?"

Mike was staring down at the table. "I don't like this. I've seen  _ Back to the Future _ ."

Richie had to dig his thumbnail into the palm of his hand not to laugh. "Excellent point, glad you brought it up. See, this isn't like  _ Back to the Future _ , actually, because--"

"Why didn't you think we'd believe you?" Bev interrupted.

Richie was taken aback. "Well, I-- Bev, it's a time-travelling closet in an old diner. You don't think that's hard to believe?"

Bev shrugged. "Not harder than the other stuff."

The other stuff. What an elegant way of referring to the first forty-odd years of their lives. Have to remember that one for later, Richie thought.

"Why did you keep it secret in the first place?" Ben asked. "All the-- the wandering around, investigating things."

Richie sighed, short and sharp. "I get why that's a sticking point, but I kinda feel like we've been over it at this point."

"Ben's right," Beverly said. She reached over to stroke Ben's wrist. "You could have called us anytime, we would've come up."

"Okay, it's not really all that simple, actually--"

"It's not like we forgot," Mike said. "We remembered you, the whole world did."

Richie chuckled nervously. "To be perfectly fair to me, I had no way of knowing--"

"All we wanted was a s-si-sign you were okay!" Bill interjected. "You couldn't have-- cou-couldn't--"

"It was the fucking turtle, okay?!" Richie shouted. Silence fell over the table.

Richie was looking manic. He took off his glasses and dropped them on the table, then pressed his open hands into his eye sockets. Ben noticed that Richie's glasses still had that crack in them. 

"Jesus fuckin' Christ," Richie was muttering. His fingers tangled into his own greasy bangs as he leaned into his hands. "It sounds so stupid, so beyond stupid, when I say it out loud. But there's this turtle, okay?"

"Like…" Bill looked on in a mix of abject horror and sick curiosity. "Like a  _ turtle _ turtle?"

Richie sighed and let his hands drop into his lap. "It's like the Anti-It. It was a clown, the Anti-It is a turtle. I'm guessing It can be… not a turtle, if It wants. Like It."

A long silence. Or maybe it wasn't that long at all, maybe it was just that time meant something totally different to Richie now. Maybe it was just that a moment's alienation from the losers felt like a lifetime of loneliness and longing.

"I know it's dumb, but--"

"N-no," Bill said. "I saw Him."

All Richie could do was blink.

"Wh-when we beat I-I--" Bill clenched his fists, pounded one against his knee.

"Really?" Richie asked.

Bill nodded. "Ma-Maturin."

Richie's jaw dropped. "Maturin? The turtle has a name?"

Bill shrugged.

"The name doesn't matter," Mike reminded everyone firmly. "You followed the turtle here and…?"

Richie nodded, shook his head, nodded again. "Sure sure. I followed the turtle here and found the door, and I've been… experimenting. I figured out the rules and stuff."

"There's rules?" Bev asked.

"There's always fuckin' rules," Richie said with a chuckle. "I think I figured most of 'em out, though. At least the three biggies."

Mike huffed lightly in agreement, or perhaps in some sort of amusement for having been through this himself. "And?"

Richie blinked again. Clearly his mind had spent so much time caught up in this that he had barely thought to put words to these rules he had discovered.

"Oh!" Richie's brain switched on, and he began to pay his jacket. "I wrote 'em down, actually."

He rifled through his pockets, producing a few more scraps with odd things written on them ("weird sound in woods" and "zombie corpse thing" among them). At last, a newer receipt tumbled out onto the floor of the diner-- this one folded neatly, rather than crumpled into a ball like the others.

"Ah!" Richie dove towards it. His chair shot out from under him with a cacophonous screeching and grinding.

Bev put her chin back on her arms to watch as Richie tried desperately to decipher what he had scrawled on the fading paper. Ben rubbed her back very gently. Bill and Mike shared a cryptic look.

"Okay, okay." Richie grinned manically. "Rule number one: no matter how much time passes through the door, only two minutes will pass on our side. I-I timed that one.”

He looked up, hoping for some sort of reaction. The group only stared at him blankly. Ben seemed to be running the experiment in his own head.

Dissatisfied with the response, Richie looked back at his list. "Okay, uh… rule number two: the world through the door is reset every time you enter." He put the paper down for a moment. "S-so if I went through and, like, carved my name into a tree, it would be there when I came back. The next time I go through the door, though, my name would disappear."

"S-so if I go through the do-door again, I won't remember seeing my-myself?" Bill asked.

"Well--" Richie sighed. "I dunno. People who go through seem to remember everything. All the pasts."

"That's kinda fucked up," Beverly remarked. She had not lifted her head, merely muttered it into the crook of her elbow.

Richie shrugged. "I think that's relative."

"Mm," Bev replied. What she meant was  _ touché _ .

"Rule number three..." Richie paused. "This one I really only have a… a feeling about. The more you try to change, the more danger you're in."

He put the paper down on the table and began to take his jacket off. The rest of the losers sort of stiffened, sensing that this action was not due to some sudden discomfort of temperature, and rather that they were about to see something disturbing.

Richie rolled up his sleeve to reveal a long, unfamiliar scar, raised and white against the smooth skin of his inner forearm. It ran nearly from his elbow to his wrist. One clean swipe.

"This," Richie said, tracing his fingers over the line, "was from my first try. It turned out… well, it turned out worse. Let's leave it at that."

Mike squirmed in his seat.

Very suddenly, Richie shot up straight and clapped his hands together. "So! Who's up for more emotionally-scarring bullshit? Any takers?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, I've been sitting on this chapter for a while... somehow I forgot about it. Here's hoping this update gets me back to writing!!


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